Brasília

Brasília, one of the most spectacular urban development projects of the modern era, went from drawing board to reality within a period of only four years, and thus the myth of the planned city was born. For half a century now, never-ending, identical images have shown us Brasília as a cold utopia. Brasília’s reality has since changed significantly. Despite the fact that essential components of the urban structure were reshaped, negated, or neglected, we are now getting a spatial idea of all of the dimensions on which the city’s master plan is based and thus of possible scenarios that may be developed from them. (…)

Against the background of the prevailing European critique of modernity and the associated revitalization of planning dogmas, the work ventures a second, an open view of the planned city of Brasília and everyday life as it is lived there beyond the images that preserve the myth. The gaze is not directed toward a city that claims to provide a solution to coexistence in an urban society, but rather toward its inherent potential. It seeks the specific spatial qualities, their appropriation and overlay. The work scrutinizes the mechanisms of image formation as generated and consistently validated by photography.